We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare. —Yeats Bombing is back in fashion: an end to thought, a flick of the killer’s arm. Add 20thcentury technology to 19th-century postures and the result, as …
It has been a pretty good season for democracy, the summer of 1974. Not quite the triumph some writers have suggested, but encouraging enough both in Europe and America. EUROPE. The collapse of the Portuguese and Greek juntas, good news …
A little unexpectedly but not the less welcome, some sensible words on terrorism come in the May 1974 issue of Ramparts, the New Left monthly. A piece signed by “the Editors” details the ugly story of how some 20 people, …
We should have known that when definitive word came to be spoken about Richard Nixon, it would be from the pen of Art Buchwald. In one of his recent skits Buchwald shows “a former White House aide” called “Deep Toes,” …
About the “ultimate” meaning of Watergate we cannot be certain. Should we regard it as a transient stain on the Republic which time will blur, as it has blurred so many others? Or does it constitute a new kind of …
The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings, 1905-1952, edited by Bruce Franklin. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books. 511 pp. The editor of this volume, a Maoist of the California school, announces that the people of China, Vietnam, Korea, and Albania …
The editor of this volume, a Maoist of the California school, announces that the people of China, Vietnam, Korea, and Albania “consider Stalin one of the great heroes of modern history.” This might, he concedes, be the result of brain-washing, …
About the “ultimate” meaning of Watergate we cannot be certain. Should we regard it as a transient stain on the Republic which time will blur, as it has blurred so many others? Or does it constitute a new kind of …
These were our rulers, these the men who ran America—the Haldemans and Erlichmans, the Mitchells and Deans and Stanses. Breaking and entering, stealing, forging historical documents and letters in the name of political opponents, rifling psychiatric files, provoking turmoil and …
Harvey Swados is a man with a white beard, full-figured, handsome as the very devil, a writer with novels, stories, essays behind him. Beaming with a child’s delight, he shows us his new house in Chesterfield, a wonderful old house, …
Many years ago Paul Goodman called me on the phone. “How are you?” I asked. “Right this minute,” he replied, “I feel lousy. Underneath, though, I’m all right. Below that there is, of course, the usual nagging. At bottom, however, …
I write a few days after the election, you will read this some weeks later. By the time you do, there will have appeared endless analyses, ranging from the trivial to the profound. And by the time you reach these …
American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957, by Joseph Starobin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 331 pp. For a certain number of persons Joseph Starobin’s book will hold an intense interest. It presents, with authoritative detail and a serious effort at objectivity, the …
Insofar as anyone can, I’ll try to answer this question. But first, some analytical remarks about the McGovern movement and the social context in which it arises. For whatever happens in November, it seems clear that a new political force …
Now that Senator McGovern has won the California and New Jersey primaries, only some unpredictable surprise or some very predictable skullduggery can keep him from getting the Democratic nomination. By the standards of American politics as it exists in reality …
